11. Digitas' James Whatley on the evolution of social media

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Inspire your audience and grow your company on Pinterest with a free business account. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. It's time to geek out. Hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, sponsored by Pinterest. I am Matt Navarra.

And I'm Martin SFP Bryant. Now, if you're the kind of person who listens right to the end of the podcast every week, you You might have been expecting me to say that our guest this week is someone from TikTok. Unfortunately, illness means he won't be with us today. Hopefully the illness is short and not looping, but he'll be joining us in a future episode. Oh God.

Jesus. Can we say things like that? Anyway, in his place though, we do have someone who has been a social media geek longer than most of us, but he's come a long way since the early days of blogging and podcasting and stuff. These days he's a well-known name in the world of marketing and digital and social. So James Whatley from Digitas UK will be joining us shortly. Don't forget, you can always get in touch with us on Twitter. So you can find me there as @MattNavarra.

And I'm @martinsfp. So Matt, what have you been doing this week?

All I can think of is two things. That is being on trains and being in London with you doing stuff for work. And then we— and being nailed and drilled, I should say, by my sergeant major kind of personal trainer guy. Three times a week, he's destroying me.

I'm aching.

I didn't think I could ache in places that I am now aching, but I'm hoping I'm going to start seeing some benefit to this kind of thing that I decided to get myself into. But what about you?

Well, it can't have escaped many people's views if you pay attention to the news, even if you're not in the UK or in Europe. The UK left the EU last Friday. I was trying to keep my mind off that by thinking about other things that were big that were happening the same day. One of the big things for me, and I was hoping that Boris Johnson, when he came and gave his address to the nation, would have been about this rather than leaving the EU, it was the new episodes of BoJack Horseman, which is the absolute— my favorite Netflix thing by a long shot.

I've never watched it.

It is brilliant. It is fantastic. It's a cartoon where animals and humans kind of interact without anyone even noticing that there's a horse and a human chatting to each other or in a relationship or whatever. And there are so many media jokes and digital publishing jokes and things in there. You'll like it. But there's also a lot of exploration of depression, mental health, all that kind of thing as well. And, uh, they're just coming to the end of it now, so I would recommend go back to the very start, watch from season 1 because you need to watch it all, and then, uh, you'll eventually get to these, these final few episodes they're showing now. And, uh, yeah, it, it was a massive highlight for me that took my mind off the, uh, the other news.

Well, I had a big decision to make this week. It's the decision that is kind of a super first world problem, is I had a meeting and to speak to some people, um, at Facebook this week. And if anyone has ever been in there or knows anything about Facebook in their offices, particularly the ones in the UK anyway, they have a huge pick and mix kind of thing. You can just go up and the staff and people who come into the office can take what they want as much as they want. And they have the bar and the food and the drinks, just like ridiculous. And every time I go in, they sort of offer and I kind of think, I kind of really do want to take a load of that pick and mix right now and like fill every hole in my bag with pick and mix. But I don't think I can. So I don't, I don't know. Have you done that? Have you had to be into Facebook, Martin?

I've not been into— I don't know, have I ever been? I have been into Facebook offices, not in London though. And no, I've not experienced that. I have experienced similar where, you know, there are fancy things on offer and you always go, no, no, I'm okay. I'm okay. And then afterwards you're like, oh, I wish I'd said yes, but it's kind of not cool to say, oh yes, I want to give me all those sweets.

I normally use my kids. I just say, oh yeah, my kids would love that. And then I take it and then I get outside and then I just scoff the lot.

So I completely love it. You turn up again a few weeks later with one tooth. Left in your mouth.

Yeah, unfortunately I don't have those sorts of meetings where I can get to do that often with Facebook. It was nice to do it this week anyway. Our guest this week is James Watley, who's a strategy partner at Digitas UK and also a really good friend of the kind of geeky UK digital sort of space. So, uh, hello James.

Hello Matt. Hello Martin. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Now we've been completely honest with James. We, you know, we had TikTok lined up today to be, um, recording with us for the show, and unfortunately, um, the person that was going to come on is, uh, unwell at the last minute, so we had scrambled to think of someone, and it was really easy to think of someone to bring on because, uh, James, we've conversed for quite a while, haven't we? How long we've been chatting now online?

Uh, now see, this is the kind of question you should have asked me before, before we started recording, because then I would have gone back and searched Twitter for the first mention of each other's name.

Do you know what I mean?

When you do that thing, you're like, when have I first spoken to this person? But yeah, for you and for Martin, basically we've been online friends for a decade, for a very long time.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's something we've actually met, have we, face to face? I don't believe—

no, we're talking on the phone, spoken on the podcast, we DM But, um, you know, we're Twitter friends. I think we're more than Twitter friends, to be fair. Come on.

I think so too. Well, and, uh, we've got loads to find out about James and what he's actually been doing recently, and also a bit about his background, so we can go into that a bit later on. But first of all, let's talk a little bit about the news this week. And Martin, what has been going on in the world of social?

Well, uh, first of all, we got some figures that we previously didn't know about two of, uh, the biggest names in social media. So, uh, Google, uh, in, in the face of some disappointing financial results overall, gave us a glimpse at how successful YouTube is. It says it's a $15 billion a year business. So that's how much YouTube makes in advertising revenue, which prompted Bloomberg to reveal via sources who I'm sure were very keen to get this across, that Instagram is apparently a $20 billion a year business in terms of ad revenue. So there we go. I would have to be honest, I thought $15 billion a year from YouTube was really, really impressive. Obviously Instagram, apparently, if this figure is right, is even better. The markets weren't so impressed at YouTube. There was a bit of disappointment there. But, but still, I think, you know, that's, that's an impressively large number. So large it's quite hard to get a handle on it. Matt?

Yeah, I see. I'm useless when it comes to this stuff because when it comes to geeky techie stuff, I'm all into all the features and kind of platform strategy and all sorts of things. But when it comes to kind of valuations and kind of what, you know, monies people are making, I kind of start to zone out, to be honest. But Nonetheless, in terms of the figure for YouTube, I, from my limited knowledge in that kind of part of this world, I would say that I was thinking it would be bigger, to be honest. But at the same time, it's still a huge number. And I think for Instagram's point of view, it's the interesting tale of actually how much that's contributing back to Facebook as a total and how much that's of an importance for discussion.

Yeah, sure. James, more of a quarter of Facebook sales.

Yes. James, what do you think?

I think it's fascinating. So quite different to you, Matt. With my nerdy head on, I tend to go deep diving into the quarterly earnings reports because I find it a fascinating read. And this kind of thing is always a bit of a misdirection. So you're completely on the money to say, you know, they've released this figure, but actually their revenues weren't as high as expected. The profit's up, but the revenue is low. And this is a misdirection to say, yeah, yeah, don't worry about the— don't worry about the revenue being low. We're not just relying on a search engine. We've got this amazing video thing over here, and that's making us tons of money. Don't worry, Wall Street, don't worry. Um, so it kind of got uncovered quite quickly, you know, but it did calm down the nerves of the, of the investment market a little bit. But, you know, it's really interesting to see numbers finally being revealed around YouTube from Google.

And how do you think about— how do you feel about YouTube at the moment in terms of how it's positioned versus other options that people have got for consuming video content? And is it placed well? And what's your take on all the other things that are going on in that area?

Um, it's— that's a really good question. So there's a— depends on who you talk to, you know, people talk about lean-in video, lean-back video, portrait video, landscape video, high-def video, 4K video, second screening. There's all kinds of different things. From a marketer's perspective, you have to go, okay, which— what mix of these would be best suited to the audience I'm trying to reach? Um, one of my constant bugbears with any trade press, with any kind of Twitter fight that happens, it's always like, oh, this is better than this, or, you know, what's better? Is it Instagram Stories or is it Snapchat Stories, or is it this versus that. And I'm always like, it doesn't have to be versus or an or, it's an and conversation. So YouTube and Instagram for a marketer can be really effective together. Um, so I don't really fall down on the one is better than the other. It's horses for courses, using the right tool for the right job.

Got you. Well, I was going to start diving into the discussion there about TikTok, but I think we're going to come on to that a lot later on anyway. But I was interested to hear what your thought as well, James, about Instagram's contribution back to Facebook and its role and its pivotal role in terms of their income over the coming years.

I That's fascinating. I mean, it's textbook, you know, there's no, it's not, um, it's no secret that there's no love lost between Facebook and Google. And the fact that this has just kind of been uncovered, you know, people familiar with the matter, the standard, you kind of go, people familiar with the matter have told me this. So basically it's a phone call saying, oh, Google did this, but Facebook did this. So it's good that they're making a lot of money, but again, you've got to kind of raise one eyebrow and go, why is that suddenly in the news? It's just a dig at a competitor. Everyone's making money.

It was the— yeah, yeah, funny coincidence that came out.

Yeah, exactly. What else we got? Something else about Instagram and talking about Instagram. What, uh, what else was happening this weekend?

Yeah, yeah. So it's been almost a year since Instagram pledged to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on its platform, reported HuffPost this week. Uh, and, uh, it turns out it's not quite been doing that. HuffPost, uh, they looked into this and found that, uh, Instagram still has plenty of, uh, misinformation about vaccines on there. This is something that they have been— in fact, across all social media have been criticized for in terms of spreading this kind of stuff. And yeah, last year there was quite a drive on this. Our own sponsors here on this show, Pinterest, recognized as one of the leaders, I have to say, totally unrelated to them being a sponsor. It's true, they are one of the leaders on this, but Instagram maybe not doing what they said they would, which unfortunately seems to be quite a theme with Facebook. Yeah, I—

on this one, I'm I have quite a lot of interest in it because it involves, you know, the young children as well and things like that. And so for me, this is one where they really do have to do better than they are doing. But I do have a pragmatic opinion of the fact that it's a big challenge. Now, I was looking a few weeks ago, someone pointed out to me there was hashtags such as depressed, depression, depressing, and variants of other mental health kind of hashtag terms. When you search them, they come up with kind of a notification that they're saying that this has been filtered down. It's been kind of slightly blocked from doing things on that particular hashtag. And it's always always wondering why they choose those specific terms because some of the terms are actually quite useful. But in terms of this particular one as well, you know, this is going to be a constant game of whack-a-mole, I would have thought. James, what do you think?

Um, I mean, we're 3 people agreeing with each other. There's no way to look at this and say, um, oh, you know, they could be doing— why haven't they done better? They should be doing better, right? Everybody knows they should be doing better. Um, the misinformation and often disinformation around anti-vaxxing is dangerous to the health of human beings, and therefore it breaks their terms of service, and therefore they should be hitting it a lot harder. You say whack-a-mole? No, ban. You know, blow up the whole thing. You know, there's got to be a way to go. Nothing around, um, vaccinations goes through without being checked by a person. Um, and I know the platform has grown massively, but if you go back, what, less— 4 to 5 years when Instagram first rolled out its advertising product, every ad that rolled out was checked by a person to make sure that it met the Instagram photographic platform standards. You're talking about pre-stories. This is all just feed-based stuff. And you're like, when it comes to making your own money, you seem to be okay to put human testing around it. When it comes to actually doesn't matter because, um, you know, we can worry about that later. No one's really legislating for it. Then we'll just do whack-a-mole and maybe we'll fix it. Maybe we won't and not really worry about it that much. I'm sure there's effort going on, but it's just not enough.

And I think then, not trying to defend any particular side of this, but it's certainly a case that there's people now, you know, they circumvent some of the stuff that some Instagram has put in place to try and tackle it, such as people will put out some of this content using linking itself to other hashtags unrelated or that are popular. So then you've got content to do with anti-vaccine kind of stuff to do with Trump 2020 or things like that. And so that there are these kind of nuances which will always kind of come up again. It'll be a problem, they'll have to tackle that problem again, and it'll always be one thing that they'll have to be challenged on. So do you Do you think it's realistic that we can expect them to get to a place where they don't have any of these problems at all?

I think it is realistic to place that expectation on them. Whether or not it's realistic that they can meet it, I don't know. I'm saddened and disappointed that they're unable to meet it. I'm yet to see any evidence that suggests that they've done significant amount of work to try and meet it. And with everything to the point that you're making, the pragmatic perspective, I get it. Of course there's going to be hundreds of thousands of people trying to do this, trying to spread this misinformation. But work harder.

Sure. And what would you want to see? What would give you enough confidence that you think that they are working harder? What sort of things can you envisage seeing them doing that would make you feel more comfortable with that then?

Strengthening of policy, strengthening of internal AI systems to detect this kind of stuff, blanket bans, the kind of thing that you see across other platforms, or the kind of thing that you— even to the point where And I, it's, I think it's a middle ground. But the other end of the extreme is having worked in advertising for quite a few years now, you come up against quite rigorous standards and expectations if you want to go and put any kind of message on any channel that isn't digital. And those kind of, that kind of legislation should apply to social and content. Admittedly, it's down to a governmental level for that legislation to come in. However, platforms should be able to self-legislate properly to, to not allow this level of, um, content to appear.

Oh, quick, quick question on that one. Do you think the, um, the public sort of, was it, court of Facebook they're trying to create with the board of members and stuff, do you have any of yours to whether that's more just kind of smoke and mirrors, or you think it's something they're going to try that's going to fail, or what do you think?

That's a great question because I quoted this podcast when I wrote about this particular thing last week in my newsletter. Um, I said, as Damian Lin's MP put it so eloquently way back in September via the always fantastic Social Media Geek Out podcast. He said, "This is a body created by Facebook, paid for by Facebook, recruited for by Facebook to sit in judgment on Facebook." That sentence alone tells you what I think of it because I just sat there nodding away going, "Oh yeah." Then here we are, what, 4 months later and it turns out they've put a whole bunch of guardrails around this super board that can make decisions about Facebook, that can ultimately be overruled. You're like, well, what's the point? Why do it in the first place?

Yeah, no, I think you've got absolutely the right angle on it, certainly from where I'm coming from on these topics. There are other things that I'm a bit more kind of not persuaded by when people sort of lambast Facebook and other social platforms. But at the moment, they're getting barrage hits with all of these things, which are things that need to be done and done better. Another story this week is What about Twitter though? What's going on with Twitter?

I have to say though, you were mentioning guacamole there. I've just been sitting here thinking about eating some guacamole.

Your brain goes in different places to me. It does, yeah. Seriously, it does.

Guacamole, guacamole. Anyway, yeah. Indeed. But yeah, so if you're a big social network, you need in 2020 a deepfakes policy. And Twitter has released its, not just for deepfakes, but for what it's calling more broadly manipulated media. So things like really intentionally misleadingly edited videos, that kind of thing, as well as the proper deepfakes where it's something that's not what it seems at all. So what they're going to do is if it's been deliberately misleadingly edited and manipulated for harm, they're going to be removing those. This is from next month. And anything else that's manipulated but isn't judged harmful will be labeled as manipulated so people will know that it is. I think this sounds great. But it sounds like a lot of work to do. So I'm really interested to see how they're doing it. But Matt, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think this is great. I think I tweeted about it saying that I thought as much whenever it was yesterday, whatever. And yeah, I think it's a great step. I think it's surprising it's taken this long to start having things like these sorts of labels on videos. It's been something that's a trend over the last few years in terms of kind of like covering certain things or labeling it, labeling it as kind of a certain ad type or whatever it might be. And I think this one's a good one to add to it. But in terms of workload. Yeah, it's like a lot of these things when it comes to moderation or there has to be some sort of filter passed through it with a human eye because AI is not, you know, proficient enough at this time to tackle it with enough accuracy. You do think, you know, how are they going to scale up for this? Is it viable? But I hope it works. And James, what do you think?

There are 3 things I find interesting about this. And the first thing is what you said, Martin, around as we approach 2020, you need a piece of legislation or a strategy to go against synthetic media or manipulated media or deepfakes. And I, when I heard you say that, I started laughing. So I was like, yes, you do if you're a social platform. Also if you're a government, also if you're a country, because we are not ready for this, um, which is my ongoing argument when it comes to deepfakes. Um, the second thing which I find interesting about it is I read the blog post that they put up about, um, the synthetic and manipulated media piece, and what I really appreciated was the transparency. So, you know, they did a survey, I think they they have had just over 6,000 responses, and they've, they've been really upfront around what those questions were, what the responses were, and the action they're taking off the back of it. You know, if we lean back into the question we were just talking about regarding Facebook and what else could be done, well, the fact that being upfront and open around this is why we're doing this, this is, um, this is why we're taking this content down but leaving this content up, this is what we're marking, this is what we're not. And that I find interesting and useful, especially Twitter as a platform. I would argue gets almost as much, um, bad press or around what it does online with its users than the other platforms. And the third and final thing is this is great in theory, but let's see it in action. And I think one of you were making the point just now about how much work this is going to be. And rolling this out meaningfully, the proof will definitely be in the pudding. And I say good luck to them.

I think a certain presidential election has been the catalyst here for a lot of this.

Yeah, I think that's true. And I think I'm interested to know what you both, Martin and James, think about kind of which of the platforms, say, in the last 12 months— let's use that time frame— has proven itself to be at least not the best? Because I don't think any of them are the best because they're all sort of not doing good enough. But has maybe done more than the rest or has made more successful changes to deal with this stuff, with manipulated media and policies around all sorts of things on the platforms for safety? What do you think, James? Is there one that stands out as doing better than the rest?

I just want to pick up on the point around the presidential election. I think you're right. We're coming up to a dangerous time in politics. I had a wry smile on my face that Twitter's doing this in the lead-up to the US election when the winner of the last US election is arguably the reason why they make money today. The second point around who's done the most. Well, I can't really say. It's policy introduction. Um, I've been a, you know, I jump on Facebook whenever they mess up on this stuff all the time, and, and I just think you have to see how the policy is enacted and how the policy rolls out before you can make a meaningful judgment. Yeah, you can judge them all on their past and what they've done before, you know, Instagram and anti-vax, it's taken them a year and nothing has changed. Facebook and its, um, whatever the name of the board is, it's— they introduced it and actually doesn't do anything. Twitter's introducing these quality today. Let's see what happens.

And do you think that TikTok's sitting on a bit of a kind of a major bomb that's just about to go off in terms of it hitting a certain threshold of whether it's in this because of the spotlight is going to be shone on it or, or the number of users grows even more that, you know, they're starting to sort of see more and more of these issues for it. And I just don't know how prepared they are technically and policy-wise.

What do you think? I'm fascinated, but I do not know enough about it to, uh, to form an opinion, but I'll be watching it very Yeah, that's going to be one that's going to be in the news, I think, for the coming 12 months.

So I think we'll wrap up the news there. We've got lots of things to talk about with James again in a moment. Geek Hour with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Each week we share tips to help you make the most of the platform.

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Visit business.pinterest.com to find out how to get your products onto Pinterest. So I'm joined by James, and now James, as I mentioned earlier, is a good friend of the show and someone that we've known for a long time, and I'm sure he's very well established. But for those few people in the world that don't know I know all about you already. Can you just tell us a bit about your past and your career and your interests and things?

I mean, you're very flattering. I don't deserve any of that, but thank you. Um, so my name is James. I'm a strategy partner at an agency called Digitas. Digitas, get the, get the elevator pitch out of the way quickly. Uh, we create digital connected digital experiences that bring brands to life. Um, and that's basically just looking at the holistic way that any brand talks to any consumer across any digital channel, and then figures out how to do that meaningfully across all of those different touchpoints. And I could talk about that for ages, but I won't, because that's not why I'm here. I've been doing this kind of stuff since, I would say, about 2006, when I joined a mobile app startup, pre-iPhone. So I was building Symbian apps and Java apps. So for some of your older listeners, they'll be like, "I remember that N95." Although most of your audience, I would imagine, are quite young, will be like, "What's he talking about? What's a Symbian?" And we basically started doing user testing, customer research, going into forums, getting customer feedback, and talking with our customers and our users in this thing called social media. And, you know, as, as I'm sure many people who have a career in social media who are around my age, just kind of fell into it. Um, and then from there, I went from startup land to agency land and to big advertising agency land, which is kind of where I've stayed ever since, but always social digital stuff like that.

I got you. And so, so what can you tell us, sort of, some of the companies you've worked for as some of your clients, or can you just tell us a little bit about some sorts of things that customers will ask you to do?

So when I first went agency side, so let me, so I'll tell you what, little, I do try and pick one or two things along the way. So when I was at my mobile app startup, that's when I started a meetup group called the Mobile Geeks of London, um, and that's how I got to know quite a few mobile nerds living across London. And the mobile and social media Venn diagram was quite close at that time. Um, and I'm a strategist, I only speak in Venn diagrams. And basically, from there I went to an agency called 1000heads, and my main client there was Nokia. And traveled all around the world doing amazing social media-y things for Nokia. Um, my highlight was doing a digital activation off the back of, uh, Dark Knight Rises. We created, um, Gotham City in Nokia Maps. And, uh, and it was like, I'm a huge comic book nerd. I'm a huge social media nerd. I was a huge phone nerd. It was like all of my three passions coming together at once. It was amazing. Um, and then when I went to Big Ad Land, well, I've worked on some phenomenal brands. Um, everything from Converse to Cronenberg to Cadbury to, um, Honda, like amazing, incredible Brands, some of them I'm still working with today. So yeah, I'm pretty, pretty lucky in the stuff I get to work on.

This week's going to be a bit different, I think. So we mentioned earlier that we were meant to have TikTok on to speak with us, but then their person was sick, unfortunately. So James has stood in and we've got some great stuff that we wanted to talk about that's off the cuff, kind of thinking about overnight, really. And so we're thinking rather than just kind of like doing any formal interview or whatever, it's kind of just like three geeks hanging out. It's just three mates talking about nerdy social media stuff. So we just thought you could all out there who are listening can just tune into our conversations if you're in a pub or something and are curious of what the geeks are chatting about, and then you can hear what we're talking about. So, we're just gonna ramble for the next hour, I guess.

I think the collective noun for a group of nerds is a podcast, isn't it?

Perfect placement then. So, I just wanna kick off just talking about the nostalgic days of social media, kind of some of your early memories of playing with what was then maybe not recognized as social media, and also kind of how things have changed since then until now.

Um, that's a great question. Um, you know, we used to— crumbs— doing social media in London in the late noughties, I think there were about 50 people that were doing it and everybody knew everyone else. Um, so you would go, oh, I'm going to go to the social media cafe on Friday and see everybody at the social media cafe. This is not a joke. This thing existed and people would go and hang out and compare notes on Twitter and on Facebook.

The Tuttle Club.

The Tuttle Club. Exactly. You were there, Martin.

I popped along sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah.

This was 2008-ish, wasn't it? Yeah.

And you would go and it'd be, and it'd be really like busy and there'd be a lot of people there. And, but you'd be talking to a head of social media for this massive brand or this head of social media for this new startup or this head of social media for this new agency. And everybody was learning from each other. Everyone was sharing knowledge and that was really exciting. And loads of meetups fell off the back of it. There was Twitter picnics, and there was Harvest Festival, where we were raising money for charity. All kinds of things. And that kind of earnest wholesomeness has kind of fallen out of it a little bit over time.

Now it's about all the likes. Get the likes.

Well, you say that. It's interesting. So I've got this chart that I use, and I'm giving away my trade secrets. But I've got this chart that I use when I'm talking to a client around around the history of social media, where we've been on, on the journey we've been on. Um, if you think about kind of the mid-'00s, and, and we'll come on to this, this is another theme, but it's not to say that these things have gone away, but just how these things have grown and shaped over the past— oh my God, it's 15 years. Um, if you go to the middle, the middle of the '00s, everything was about influence. And so if you had a couple of thousand Twitter followers, or, you know, if— and that, that's the numbers we were talking about— you could get couple of tickets to go and fly somewhere and do a review. And if you wrote about it on your blog, then you've done your job. And that was everything that everybody considered social media to be around that time. If we get a good blog going, then I might get some free stuff and I might get to see the world. And some of us did that, and that was pretty cool. Um, and then from there you kind of went into— then Facebook arrived and, you know, suddenly everything was about chasing those likes. So if you had a company, if you had a brand, you're like, right, I want to get 100,000 likes, I want to be a million likes. And those of us working on agency side, and I'm sure there's a few people listening now, would have got that brief from their client that said, get me a million likes on my Facebook page. Some of them may even have that brief right now, and I feel their pain. But that thing just kind of reveals it.

If anyone's got one of those out there, they can kind of, kind of do some redaction on it and get it out there. Let's have a look. That sounds good.

I, I may have heard one. I think within the last 24 months, I've definitely heard that from a client. Um, and I'm not saying where or which one, but that has been heard. And, but that, you know, kind of gives you the idea that the knowledge just hasn't got that far. For me, the third stage was all around the targeting aspect. So, you know, and the way that entered the public sphere was around, um, you know, the Brexit vote. You know, they did dark posting and they did, you know, super targeting. And leave.eu had 450 variations and everybody was like, oh, this is really, really bad. And all marketers were like, well, this is just the stuff we do every day. I don't know what you're talking about. All of you see different ads every day because that's what we pay Facebook to do for you. Um, and I found that fascinating. And, and now we're moving again to back to mass audience stuff. So over the past year or so, I'd say since, um, say 2 years, How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp has kind of reorientated the marketing industry a little bit and made everybody think about mass marketing, mass penetration, getting the message out to everyone as much as possible. And so reframing again how advertisers are looking at social media. That was quite a lecture, but, um, but as I said, it's one chart, but you put up one slide and I can talk for 20 minutes.

I'll bring us back down to earth with a Friends Reunited Those days of Friends United, 147s at your school, blah, blah, blah. And then the kind of the lacking features it now seems to starkly show as not having. What were your kind of platforms that you remember that were kind of years and years ago? Friends, there was obviously one as well.

FriendFeed. I'm older than that.

FriendFeed was the best social network for a certain amount of time, not only in terms of the community on there, it was fantastic community, but the quality of the tech, they were way ahead of everything else in terms of— they were first to do real-time feeds. I remember the day they launched real-time feeds and everyone lost their minds. I remember logging into FriendFeed and this real-time feed, it was scrolling at an insane rate and they just turned it on and like, it was amazing. Um, it sounds stupid now, but, uh, yeah, FriendFeed, uh, was, uh, was, yeah, amazing.

ICQ.

ICQ. Well, that was, that That was a messaging app, wasn't it? I suppose it was a precursor to WhatsApp or something.

It was. And there was some other ones I was thinking of a moment ago, but I just remember like even the things like chatting to people on who are online in that social element, that real rudimentary stuff when you had the bloody 500 hours of free AOL time, stick, stuck, disk stuck on something and you whack it in and you have to kind of disconnect it when you finish and plug it in and plug it, you know, it turned off the internet. And there was a joke with Kevin Bridges that talks about there was a day when you you could turn on the internet for a few hours and then you just unplugged it at the end of the day.

First social network for me, Yahoo Profiles.

Wow.

I met so many people through messaging people through their Yahoo Profiles. And, um, yeah, it was, yeah, I had so many contacts on there and I still got that Yahoo account from all those years ago, but, uh, haven't logged in for a long time.

Yeah, no, it's, uh, those things have changed so, so much. Um, I was sat down yesterday, a completely changing the subject altogether now. I was just sat on the train coming back from London after me and Martin had been doing some project work, and I was looking at some of the news I'd missed, and there was a digital news report that was put out from the We Are Social Hootsuite digital report, which comes out. It's really good, so if you haven't seen it, you should have a read of it. It's really cool. There's some just crazy stats now, and I just thought, I wonder what people would make of some of these stats. There was one there, there are more social media users today than there were people in 1971.

Madness.

TikTok is now the 6th largest social network.

Uh, 80% of the time spent using TikTok is by Chinese users, 10% is by Indian users, leaving only 10% by the rest of the world, for the rest of their user base. So the growth potential there is huge. And then Reddit monthly active users up by 30% in the last year, 29% for Pinterest. And then the final one I was reading on the way home, the same thing, 2.5 billion Facebook users, 400 million bogus accounts is estimated. Um, kind of some of those Can you believe it's 1971? There are more social media users today than there were people in 1971. But any of those kind of stand out for you, James?

It reminds me of, um, being able to open Twitter and the first thing you would see is the firehose before they introduced an algorithm, before they introduced your friends-only feed. Like, if you go on Twitter now, you can only see your friends. Yes, you can put in search terms and stuff, but when you used to be able to open Twitter and literally you would just see what everyone in the world was tweeting at that time.

Madness.

But you could make sense of it. You're like, oh yeah, this— and then you would find your friends in there because that's how little people were using it. Um, and now at those kinds of numbers, yeah, it's just kind of— there's a little bit of me which is like, yeah, global population is growing, that's, that's a bit of an issue. That, that's probably something we should look at as well instead of admiring Facebook's numbers.

But that's because I'm getting But remember, Mark Zuckerberg says he doesn't need to be liked. He says he doesn't need to be liked, he just wants to be understood, or wants Facebook to be understood. Do you think that's true?

That worries me a little bit. It's like, I'm not even going to try to be liked anymore. I just want to be understood. You can take that.

Do what I want.

Almost, yeah. You could interpret it that way.

Facebook has this phenomenal habit, almost an impulsive obsession with making itself the story. So no matter what happens, if it's a manipulated video of Nancy Pelosi, if it's a new policy around something really inane or benign, and you just go, yep, sure, that's fine. And then somebody says something or does something that just puts Facebook's PR policy slap bang in the middle of the story. And I don't know why or how they do it. What on earth was he thinking to say such a thing? How on earth would you think that would be reflected? I don't understand how it manages to do it every time.

No. Well, we've been around this topic, I think, a few times. And I was speaking to some people who've worked for Facebook in the past recently. And we were just saying, how do they ever get to a place, and in what time frame, where people do see Facebook in anything other than this dystopian, crazy, bizarre world that Mark Zuckerberg, people think, he's creating? I don't know how they get away from that. Do you think they can? Will they ever?

Um, not without, not without removing, um, the C-suite, I don't think.

Um, do you think it's more than just about Mark Zuckerberg, or do you think it is, it's all about him and it's his story?

It's just you need an outsider to understand how you're viewed from the outside. And, you know, if you think about the journey that Uber's currently on, for example, completely tangential, um, but if you look at the journey that Uber's been on since— I forget his surname, but Travis what's-his-face left, who was— thank you— who is arguably the source of the main issues that were going on there. I'm not saying that any of those issues are solved, but you can see that there's been quite a shift in the way that it handles itself, the policies it's introducing, the PR that it's doing around itself, the protection it's doing of its reputation, the rebuilding of the reputation. You go, that's because they've now got a new CEO who came in from the outside, aside and goes, right, this is a company that we now need to look after, not your baby, because you're a founder and you've got this vision how you're going to change the world, but maybe the world doesn't agree with you anymore, so somebody else should run this ship now.

Um, no, yeah, I think it's a common narrative.

And I think, I think another problem is we've never seen a company of this size before, a ginormous corporation with this many users doing this kind of work. Essentially the biggest advertising company, um, with active users, et cetera, with so many people touching so many lives, so many— it's such a huge proportion of the population. Uh, we've never seen a corporation quite like that operating like that. And it's up to all of us, not just Mark Zuckerberg, to understand how to make sense of that, because there may well be other companies like that of that size in the future. And, uh, yeah, we're all learning how to make sense of Facebook.

What do you, um, go, sorry, James, do you want to finish up on that point?

Yeah, it just kind of, that leans into a kind of a parallel point around the legislation piece that we've touched upon already in this. I had this discussion on Twitter recently. And in fact, somebody from Facebook has messaged me about it to have just a separate conversation. Because rightly, Facebook is saying, we have too much power over this. If you want us to do more with this, we can only do so much. You should legislate. Us, individual governments, individual countries. My argument to that at the moment is you can't say that to governments and countries and pretend you're having that conversation in a vacuum. You've got to look at the wider context of what's going on in the Western political landscape and so on and go, "Right. Well, why is it in," for example, President Trump's interest to legislate Facebook against lying in political ads. It isn't. And so therefore, that legislation will not be forthcoming. And so if you take the argument out of the vacuum, then I think it's incumbent— you're right, Martin, it is incumbent upon all of us, and I include all of Facebook in that, to do something about the issue.

We're talking all about Facebook, um, but then the name that also comes up when you talk about Facebook right now, for me anyway, with the conversations I have, is, is TikTok. Uh, it's kind of the other— if I'm not talking about Facebook, I'm talking about TikTok with somebody. Uh, in those stats, TikTok, the 6th largest social network now based on active users, and, uh, it's in the news as much at times as, as Facebook. Um, what do you make of TikTok? Let's talk TikTok, James. What's your view on all of this?

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna adopt the marketer perspective on this. Um, and TikTok for me, parking size, parking the novelty, parking the sheer fun that exists on the platform.

I love it.

Um, from a marketing perspective, this is the new new boy. And what I mean by that is, um, working in advertising, you always talk to a client about, right, where do you want to put your budget for this campaign? And you always go, well, I'm going to put 70% in the channels that I like, 20%, um, in up-and-coming channels, and then 10% will do, uh, an experiment or a piece of innovation, or we'll do something new and build something new. And in that, in that 30% at the end, there's always a little bit that might go, oh, should we give Snapchat a go? Or should we do, um, should we try and do a Facebook Live? Um, and at the moment this year and going into this year, so back end of last year, that 10%, that 15% is going, oh, we should be doing something in TikTok. Can we, can you find out more about that? So it, the bleed is happening through to marketing land, which, which I always find interesting. Because, you know, you go back, you go back 5 years and you'd have to wait for your client to read something in Wired before you get the call and say, can you do QR codes? Um, but now everybody gets their sources of information from the same place. They're seeing these things at the same speed as you are. And so you're getting the question, I've heard about this thing called TikTok, can we do something in that? And so, um, a lot of agency people right now, myself included, are joining up as quickly as possible to learn as much as possible to find out what and how they can be used for advertising. Yeah.

That's what everyone loves. That's what makes a social network work really well. So in terms of TikTok at the moment, there's still question mark. Is this a flash in the pan or is this a big giant that's here to take on the big bad Facebook? But I don't know if you've sort of got a sense of that yet or what we'd need to see to be able to sort of get a sense of that.

I don't think it is a flash in the pan. I don't think we're looking at a another Vine, for example. And the reason for that is, as you've quite rightly pointed out, it is already massive. It's not a startup being run out of someone's garage with a CEO in their pants trying to figure out how to get the servers working at the weekend when they've got loads of users. And the fact that before the end of the first month of this year, they managed to roll out a self-serve advertising platform, that's just like— all the eyes have lit up of marketers across the world and go, OK, well, they're obviously adults. They obviously mean business. And they've got the content and the users to back it up. Um, so no, I don't think it's a flash in the pan. Um, it'd be interesting to see how the landscape shifts around it or what it does to the landscape when it starts to really establish. You know, if you go back to the days when Instagram was just getting going, um, and you know, it was bought for a billion dollars and now it's making $15 billion a year, uh, sorry, $20 billion a year. That's the kind of speed that happened. And as we all know from this industry, things happen faster and faster and faster. So TikTok has arrived arguably in the West out of nowhere and is growing at an unbelievable rate. Yeah, this thing is going to be around for a little while yet, I think.

Do Byte— how does Byte play into this? It's very new, early on the scene. For those that haven't got up to speed with Byte yet, this is from the founders of Vine originally and their team, Dom, behind that. And now they've come up with this app, which is kind of short video. It has the hallmarks of kind of the likes of a TikTok and some sort of story features. What do you think of Byte and all of this?

What strikes me about Byte is that they're a new startup. And then, as you were saying there, James, TikTok is this huge thing from ByteDance, which is an enormous Chinese company. And it makes me wonder now, I don't, I don't think I don't think it's anywhere near realistic for a new social app to come from a startup these days, a new properly huge world-changing social network to come from a startup. You kind of need that scale. Like when I fired up Byte for I think the second time, the first thing I saw was, let's just say, some, a certain part of a man's body on the screen. And I blocked and reported it. But I thought, I wonder if they've got anything plugged into this to deal with this kind of thing, because, because the, the amount of things you need to think about in terms of moderation, in terms of compliance, all of that kind of thing, it's so much more than it was what we were talking about, you know, 10, 15 years ago when people were first starting to do social networks, mobile apps, et cetera. Um, so I do wonder if the barrier to entry is so high now that you can only really expect something like TikTok to come in at the scale it's coming at. Uh, yeah, and we might not see many true social startups that change the world, uh, from humble beginnings.

When was the last big one?

Oh God, that's interesting. I mean, what would you define?

Yeah, you'd have to say Snapchat, right? And how long has that been around? 5, 8 years?

A long time.

Yeah, right. So it's been a while. We're due one, right? Um, I, I mean, I'm trying to make a serious point, but in the back of my head, I can just— I've just got image of me and Matt talking about TikTok while Martin's in the corner playing chat roulette on Byte.

That sounds about right. But we've touched on— you touched on the Snapchat. I had some scribbled writing here. I think it's some words from me saying Snapchat, what next? And I guess that's, that's a good question. What is next for Snapchat? What do you think?

Haven't they just missed their earnings?

They— yeah, but they, they did. I think this is literally yesterday, wasn't it?

Same thing, which is revenues down but profits are up. Same thing Google. Um, but they didn't get such a kicking just because they're doing so well on the innovation front. You know, where Snapchat go, everyone else follows. And while the, the numbers aren't massive, they're still at the forefront of, of, you know, laying down the, um, laying down the innovation for AR, laying down the innovation for photography. Um, you know, they laid down the roadmap for stories for Instagram, and that if they keep up that rate of innovation, then I think they're going to be around It's a similar thing for me where I've kind of turned the corner a little bit on Snapchat in that I used to kick them left, right, and center. And if you'd have seen me give any talk, any trend presentation over the past 5 years, I would've often said, "They're not long for this world. They're going to get bought or they're going to disappear because they're just not doing enough." And I've kind of been won over a little bit because having seen the numbers up close, having seen the constant dedication to that ongoing innovation,, you go, maybe they've just carved out their niche. Comparing them to Facebook, comparing them to TikTok, comparing them to Twitter is fundamentally wrong because yes, they're in that space, but that's not the platform that it is.

We've got the guy from Snapchat on next week, the guy being Ed Couchman, who's the UK general manager for Snap Inc. We have to start thinking of some questions coming up soon. But for me, for Snapchat, people tend to talk about the Spectacles, and they talk about the map, Snap Map, and how —both of those are the things that they would see new bits coming from and seeing things that could be exciting and interesting. Do you think there's other things that Snapchat could be doing or should be making more benefit or getting more out of?

They're in danger of being squeezed out, I would say, for even just from a marketing perspective. Coming back to the point I was making around TikTok being the new 10-20% of marketing budget, um, newbie, that place used to belong to Snapchat. So if you're not delivering meaningful returns on investment for your clients and partners who are buying the advertising revenue where you make your most money, then you're going to get squeezed out of that little gap because you need to get onto the permanent roster because TikTok's snapping at your heels for that innovation budget. Innovation in, you know, in inverted commas. Um, Snapchat's done a really good job in the US on its TV product, and I forget the name of it. It might be just Snapchat TV, but it lives in the content part of of the, of the app. And the numbers they're seeing there are ridiculous. And that's launching in the UK this year, I believe. And if they do the success that they've done in the US with that here, then I can see clients opening their wallets again and hopefully helping them hit their earnings next time around.

Yeah, got you. Well, um, what we haven't talked about is things to do with brands and brand marketing, and specifically any particular brands that you think I'm doing well. I was going to chat to Martin about this as well. What do you see in your newsfeed that comes up and has made you go, wow, or you've heard about that's good? Because most of the stuff that I see in my feed is drivel. I'm obviously sloping around the wrong places or something, but I'm just not seeing anything that's making me think it's amazing at the moment.

What I'm interested in is your definition of drivel before I go on. Drivel.

Oh, well, based on my feed, if it's Facebook, it's just the usual crap, someone selling, you crap pills, diet pills that don't work, through to someone kind of vaguebooking and saying they're feeling like someone's annoyed them at work today and not wanting to name who it is. Just real drivel, just kind of pointless, inane kind of stuff that I can do without sometimes. What would you define it as?

Poor ads. Poor ads are rubbish. And by poor ads, you look at it and go, that copy on that ad doesn't make sense, or why am I seeing this ad? I get a lot of gambling ads and I don't gamble. And it annoys me. Um, and I'm always muting it and I'm always deleting it and I'm always blocking it. And that's the only thing that annoys me when it comes to advertising ads which are rubbish, poorly targeted, um, they're boring. I like to focus on the stuff which is good. So for example, there was a really cute one knocking around today which basically it was from HMRC Revenue saying thank you for filing your, your tax return returns, and it was just tar with a kiss on the end. And I'm not explaining it very well, but there we go. Thank you, Martin. Thank you. I get it. That's really cute copywriting. And seeing that, I go, I get it. That's fun. It's clever. It's playful. Um, you know, one of the examples that's loved and hated, lambasted at the moment— I think it's good— is the, um, the Oatly work. Have you seen this stuff from Oatly? They're an oat milk product.

No, I haven't.

Yeah, so the ads are always kind self-aware. They know they're an ad, and they talk to you as if they know that you know it's an ad, and they're having fun with you. So it will say things like, "Don't tell anyone that this is an ad for oat milk," or, "Everybody else on this tube doesn't know that oat milk is the best thing because you've just read this ad," kind of thing. I'm getting it horrendously wrong, but that kind of stuff where somebody's just gone through a bit of effort and tried to make it work.

Um, yeah, they've taken the kind of the twee copy of things like, um, Innocent Smoothies, which I think a lot of people have taken too far that kind of knowingly twee, uh, but they've taken a slightly different direction, which I quite like. And it helps, I do like the, uh, Oatly oat milk, um, so that's probably, uh, influences my opinion slightly. But, uh, yeah, there's a nice touch to that particular kind of copy.

Oh, I know what I was gonna ask about was political social media. We've just come out of an election, we've fun things from social platforms, uh, from, uh, the Conservative Party and from, from other parties. Uh, I'm treading very carefully until, uh, we get into the topic. Um, but yeah, what, what did you make of all the different kind of goings-on in terms of social media for the political parties in the UK this year?

Um, I mean, it's the same point I made about Trump earlier on. I don't think that any one party— and the party in government right now probably wouldn't do it— there is a cross-party movement at at the moment to introduce legislation that, um, is as powerful and is as strong as the, um, CAP code for the ASA. And that just— what's that? Oh, so the CAP code is basically what the ASA, who are the Advertising Standards Authority, um, they rule over all advertising. So if you see an ad that says This ad will make— I'm sorry, this Mars bar will make you taller. You can complain to the ASA and say, this Mars bar will not make me taller, and then the ASA will ban Mars bar from putting that ad out again. Um, and if you break that, the ASA can go to the government and say, can you help here? Or they can issue fines and so on and so forth. I think that's kind of how it works. It's self-regulated. It's, um, everyone who works in advertising knows the CAP code, knows and understands it. And if there's bits of it you don't know, you have to go and read about it. There was one in the press today where Ryanair ran a couple of ads saying, "We're the lowest cost airline and we're always also the lowest emission airline. If you fly with us, you're going to be putting out lower emissions." And everyone knows that flying is the highest amount of carbon you can bring out to the air when it comes to transport. And so the ASA ruled against advertising, and Ryanair are not allowed to say that on any ads again in future. Now, anybody who works in advertising has to abide by the ASA's CAP code. If you get a letter from the ASA, you're about to enter a whole world of pain. I've seen it happen. Um, and you just have to prove it very, very quickly that you, you've been able to do what you said you do. So I can give you a real-world example of this. We did a campaign, um, when I was at, when I was at an unnamed agency for an unnamed, um, alcohol brand with some influencers. Influencers. All the influencers were over 21 and all of them, um, put, um, I think it's when Instagram introduced sponsored by, um, you could have a sponsored by tag in, in feed. And Matt, you'll know about, probably know more about this than I do, but there was a, there was a time, it might still be around where you could have this post is sponsored by, um, this type of vodka or this type of, um, alcoholic drink. Yeah. But that would only appear in feed, not on profile. And so if you viewed that ad on pro— if you view that sponsored content on profile, you wouldn't know it's sponsored. And the team that I was sat near when that letter from the ASA came in, we're like, oh my God, we need to fix this. We cannot get gutted by the ASA. And you just, you have, you know, suddenly you're in pain. Point being, anyone who works in Adland in marketing has to abide by and that's it, period, the end. There's no arguments. The ASA's cap code does not apply to political advertising. Right. So you can say whatever the hell you want if you're a politician. There's no rules around it whatsoever. If you want to say Turkey's joining the EU, you say it. If you want to say that, you know, you've got no money because of those bloody immigrants, you can say it. And it's awful, absolutely awful. As I said, there's a cross-party movement right now that is trying to get this to the top of the agenda.. But it's just, it's slow, and you're working against a force who is in government with the majority whose benefit it is not in to make this happen.

Did you have much fun with the shitposting that went on in the campaign? Because I think I remember seeing some of your tweets about it, to be honest. Uh, I think depending on your experience or background in, in digital social versus not sways heavily as to what you thought of it. But, um, if you can try and extract it from your political opinion, but what What strategy do you make of it all?

Well, they call it, I think they call it the dead cat strategy. Is it called the dead cat strategy?

It's a new term on me, but go on. It's a strategy, yeah.

Yeah. Where basically somebody is talking rubbish or starts needling you about a particular question. Like, you know, Martin, why did you do that really horrible thing yesterday? Martin will produce a dead cat and put it on the table and everybody will stop and forget what Martin did yesterday and instead talk about the dead cat. Um, that is in inverted commas, a strategy. I think it's a tactic, but it's a strategy. And you go, okay, fine. And the, the modern-day equivalent of that is shitposting. I'm just going to talk utter shit. I'm going to post stuff in Comic Sans. I'm going to really wind up the people who hate us to make sure they're constantly looking in the other direction while we're doing all this other stuff. Um, and there's loads of benefits of doing it for the person doing the shitposting. Posting, you're misdirecting attention. You're basically putting a big target on all of the people gathering around the dead cat, for all the people who are all on your side to come and point and laugh. Ultimately, if it works today, you know it's going to work tomorrow. Again, it comes back to, these things should be legislated. It's not going to be legislated because the people who are in power have no interest in legislating it.

How do you find it separating yourself from your political view and your professional view?— you don't know if you like the Conservative Party. I don't know if you do or you don't. But you admire what they did in terms of the strategy and how effective it was. Do you have that kind of feeling about any of this stuff?

So that's a really good question about cognitive dissonance. And so I face this all of the time. So I can sit here and talk to you about how annoyed I am around the lack of policy implementation from Facebook around deepfakes and being manipulated media. Um, I can also then go and tell my clients and say Facebook's the best way to reach your audience, um, with the advertising that you've got. You've got this real kind of constant battle to say how and where does this fit in. And fundamentally, yes, you could say professionally I admire the effectiveness of the strategy that they've adopted, but as a human being, I just think it's fundamentally wrong to mislead the populace knowingly and try and get them to do something based upon false knowledge. Misinformation and disinformation is the most dangerous thing that's never happened to our media. Um, combine that with the putting mistrust in the journalism— that's genuine journalism that is happening— moves us into a very dangerous place indeed.

Martin, you know, we're pretty opinionated on this because I, I think that, um, I can admire from afar some of the tactics that were employed, but I, um, yeah, I kind of slightly agree with, with James really, that kind of like, it's like one of those, you know, you may not have broken the law but you broke the spirit of the law kind of things, you know. It's not about that. I don't know if you agree about that?

I think that they are very keen to take advantage, kind of get the first mover advantage and try something new. But the thing is, once you've got people used to a certain level, which is very low, of discourse and persuasion and advertising, then you've set the bar very low for everyone. And it shows a kind of level of contempt for standards and for standards of life, really. I do worry that everyone— basically, if you look at the right, to get political about this, the right is leading on a lot of this kind of stuff. You look at the Trump campaign and some of the things they do, and it happens in the UK and elsewhere. A lot of people who are on the center-left are saying, well, if we're ever going to get in power, we need to start taking that approach as well. You're probably going to start to see a lot more on the other side as well. Then any sense of consensus gets broken down. And everything is about conflict and being just cheeky enough that you're breaking some rules and annoying the right people. How we come back from that, I don't know, but I hope we do.

You've hit the nail on the head for me, actually. The normalization of that kind of communications is frustrating and scary, and yet it's already happened.

Happened. I am in a pub here, so I've made myself a drink. You know, we are in a sort of geeky hangout, so just in case you wanted to get yourself a beer or anything. Um, but it's got quite nerdy, quite deep quite quickly. Sorry, gang. So we're cracking on with the time, and there's loads of this bits of pieces on my paper that kind of scribbled last night furiously when I was DMing, uh, James to come on the show. And, uh, one of them that I got written down is about kind of brands and authenticity and kind of stuff to do with climate change. And what I meant by that, I think at 11 o'clock last was about the fact that it's now such a big political football, the climate change thing, rightly so. It should be, you know, high up in the profile of people's priorities, I should say. But at the same time, brands are just starting to scramble to kind of be that bit more authentic, or at least try to be authentic and also try and leverage the climate change and being right for the community and all that sort of stuff. Do you get a lot of that kind of vibe in Adland, as you called it? Yes.

And I think I think the penny is starting to drop a little bit. So to give this some context, last year I worked on two significant pieces of industry climate change work. One was the Adland-wide climate strike, where I think for the global climate strike, we did climate and strike, where create and strike, basically, where we all came up with a creative idea to take the Climate Strike. Digitask, for what it's worth, created an out-of-office that everybody could use. Then I also worked on getting 2 million young people to get registered to vote with climate in mind ahead of the election. As a strategist in advertising, in communications, your job is to understand a topic in the most and best possible way you can, in the in the short amount of time that you probably have to get to the bottom of that topic. And then within that topic, find insights that will then inspire a creative team to get to some good work. Given the brief for the climate change work, I had to get really, really deep on the climate issues facing the planet. And I just go, oh my God, it's frightening how much we're being lied to about the stuff we need to change and so on in the world. And the impact, to bring it back to your question, the impact that the client, the Create and Strike work has had on the in the advertising industry I find fascinating, more so because I'm sat in client meetings and I've got people working on my team asking the client directly, "What are you doing about climate change? How does this particular part of your product chain get recycled? How does this particular thing impact your footprint? If that is an issue, how are you working to impact that?" You go back back, I would say, less than 3 years, and somebody on an agency side wouldn't dream of challenging a client in that way, wouldn't dream of saying, "Yeah, but your green credentials are pretty rubbish, so why should we do the work?" And now the fact that there's the courage to push back and people are feeling more empowered, the tide is slowly beginning to turn, and it's actually really inspiring. Inspiring to see?

Well, I, um, I just see so much of it now, these kind of ads coming out, and I can just imagine a clamoring of kind of brands trying to find a way to do something with it. And I just— it makes me cringe because most often the, the small to medium-sized campaigns I've seen have been pretty awful, whereas I think some of the bigger ones have so far have got away with it.

But, um, I just want to pick up on something that you've said there, which I think you're getting at something which is around brands trying to do something that might impact climate change or might do something that makes them look a bit greener than they are. I went to an amazing event last year called One Question, and the one question they posed was, does purpose really drive profit? And one of the speakers was talking about how much they don't really shame people for not getting it right yet. And I think it was a guy from Patagonia saying, look, we take on suppliers who aren't always got the best green credentials, but eventually they will do, and we're going to try and help them get there. And so while I am dead against brands doing what it might be called greenwashing, and there was a great piece by Mark Ritson talking about this the other day, but greenwashing, fine. If you're doing all this bad stuff in the background, that's awful. But if it's a meaningful step forward in the right direction, then I'm all for it, and we shouldn't shame people for it.

I hope that that's the case, is that we don't don't just have lots of brands jumping on the bandwagon and then it becoming a cringe fest because I think a lot of the political points that need to be made there as well as the action that needs to be taken is quite a serious one. So it's just, uh, let's see what happens in that space, I guess. But I just know I'm sort of looking at my clock and I've poured myself a second drink. I'm on my second JD and Coke. It's now, we've probably been recording for about an hour or so and I've got tons of these scribbles all over my page. But what I'm thinking is I'm just going to rattle through a couple of them with you, James, seeing you're our guest of honor and you can just give me your sort of instant thoughts on some of these. Verification. Should we get rid of it now?

What for? Why would we get rid of it?

It just causes so much argument and it causes my DM box to go crazy and it's starting to wear me down.

I knew that was going to be the answer. Please can we get rid of verification so I don't have to keep answering idiots asking me for a blue tick? That's the base. That's the question.

Basically, that is it. No is the answer.

You need verification because especially when we're moving into this world of distrust and mistrust, knowing who is verified when they're speaking is a good thing.

I speak to so many people who, when they're honest, after a few drinks after work, you say to them, come on then, talk to me about social media and ROI. How are you proving what you're doing is the right thing to do? And the rest of it, and I don't really know, I don't like analytics, or my boss doesn't really get it. It kind of— still a lot of that. It's unbelievable. I'm sure that can't possibly go on, on the big brands that you're working with, James.

No, of course not. It's a redundant question. And if you don't know know how your— if you don't know what the ROI of your social media spend is at the moment, then you probably shouldn't be working in social media or marketing. Oh, that's hard.

Strong words. But the thing is, it's 10, 10 years ago when I first started out doing social media for public sector and, and then for some brands, it— that was just kind of no one really looked. But now I'm super hopeful that it's not—

I'm shaking my head because like almost every presentation I think I've ever given in on this always starts off with one slide and it's big white impact font on one black slide that says, what is your objective? What is it you're trying to achieve? And how can we do that? We're using the tools we've got available to us. And if you don't set out what it is you're trying to do before you do it, then you don't know if you've done it by the end of it. And that's how you measure the ROI of it.

And you'd think it would be simple as that, wouldn't you? Apparently it's not. So according to the people I speak to anyway, uh, influencer marketing, hype, A lot of it. I remember sticking out, got myths versus realities. Well, you know, dispel some of the myths about influencer marketing.

Oh, uh, no, I don't want to because it's such a poison chalice. It works for some people. You all, all you're ever hearing is the people who are taking the piss out of it and people who are getting it wrong. People are earning loads of money off the back of brands that don't know what they're doing. And while there is a ton of really good influencer marketing work going on, and it's done at such a scale that you probably don't see it or hear about it, and there's not going to be a huge award-winning influencer case study out there because it does small things in increments. And there is a role for it in certain brands and in certain marketing mixes. It's just a shame that it's mired by idiots at either end, either getting it wrong or just making the other influencers look stupid.

I think I could go along with that. I think I could support that cause. Uh, regulation— of two things that we should be having in place in the next 12 months that would regulate Facebook and any others that people have problems with, what would you be sticking in place?

Um, I would be putting in a piece of legislation around health advertising. And in fact, no, it's, it's one— I would regulate social media as harshly and as stringently as we do regular media. That seems reasonable to ask.

Martin, You normally get involved in these discussions. I've seen you on Twitter talking about BBC and things. Just quickly, what do you make of kind of like regulating social media the same as normal media?

I don't think you can regulate it the same as normal media because it's totally different.

The same standard, I think, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think you need to in some way. It's a sign of, it's a positive sign really. It's a sign that social media has come of age, that it needs to be regulated in some way. And I won't go into every single form of regulation that's needed, and everything, every single type of regulation that's needed. But, uh, but yeah, um, the idea that we couldn't just scoot on as we are, uh, no, I don't think so at all. I think governments need to get serious about it. And, uh, and yeah, governments need to get serious about it in the same way that the public policy departments at the big tech companies are in their lobbying efforts to make sure they're regulated in exactly the right way that benefits them. Let's not make sure that happens. Yeah, right.

Some quick ones there. LinkedIn, is it, is it come back? Is it cool now? Is it cool to be using LinkedIn now? Why would it be cool? Well, a lot of people seem to be wanting to do more with LinkedIn. So again, people are walking around saying, LinkedIn, should I be doing something with LinkedIn? It seems to be better these days and things are different now on LinkedIn. Do you think that's the case?

LinkedIn has matured when it comes to this advertising offering. Yes, definitely. Um, and if you want to speak to a certain type of audience, then of course it should absolutely be in your marketing mix, but, but don't do it because you think it's cool.

That's, that's not good, is it? Have we reached peak Facebook? As I've written down here. Yes. Interesting. I think that's, that on its own, I can see would be, would be good. Uh, last couple of bots and messaging apps, you know, is there a place for them? Is it going to, is it this year going to actually something meaningful going to come out of that space for kind of brands and social networks? And social media managers?

It's the same thing as the influencer question, I would argue, in that there are millions of Messenger bots doing great jobs for hundreds of thousands of users today. None of them are setting the world on fire, but they don't need to. They're answering a task. They're answering a need, a user need. And if they're doing that, then that's what they're built for, and that's okay.

Good answer. I think that's as good a— better answer than what I would have come up with. But in terms of the last question, any apps apps, toys, tools, social media, digital things online that you found are cool recently that you think, oh, that was pretty awesome? Hmm.

Great question. Great question. I have been— the thing that I missed the other day was the— this isn't a digital thing, but it was an ad. The Super Bowl ads all dropped. Yes. And the first thing I do after the Super Bowl is I wake up and I watch all the movie trailers. Yes. This is my— I'm glad I didn't meet you.

I'm the only person. I do this. Yes, this is me as well.

In fact, I made a playlist of all the movie trailers, and then I watched the movie trailers. Awesome. Um, but then I started watching all the ads, and they were really, really good. But then, um, there's a chap called Patrick Collins, Paddy, who writes a newsletter called Because the Internet, and he included one on his most recent edition called Smart Park, which I'd missed. And it was really, really funny, and it has, um, Chris Evans in it from Captain America. And I just thought it was really good. I was like, oh, I missed that. That's good. People might like that.

Well, I've seen some of the stuff from the Super Bowl this year, but to me, again, it's never as good as it was years ago. There's, there's some things I've seen in years gone by that blow me away, but I haven't seen anything this year other than Facebook have done their first ad, didn't they? We should say that really. They've dropped a big Super Bowl ad about groups. And if you haven't figured it out yet, you're going to be seeing a lot about groups and messaging, private messaging from Facebook in terms of the product features and the development. You know, they've even mentioned in their forward-looking statement, I think actually for the year ahead, which was the other day when it released.

So anyway, groups are the only reason I have a Facebook account.

Well, it's increasingly becoming similar to me. I barely do anything other than groups in there. Yeah, I think you're right. That's true. On that bombshell, I think that's stolen from another program, isn't it? Okay, Alan Partridge, could you tell everyone about things that are interesting to you and where they can find you online? Because you do a lot of cool stuff.

There are 3 things I can tell you. One, you can find me on Twitter. I'm @whatlydude. That's probably my platform of choice. Two, I've got a newsletter if you're of interest. It covers some industry stuff, some social stuff, mainly nerd stuff. That's pinned at the top of my Twitter feed if you're interested. And then the third and final thing, because I promised my friend that I'd talk about this, we're working on a charter to increase diversity and inclusion at conferences and events. If you're interested in increasing diversity and inclusion at conferences and events, please follow me on Twitter, because I'm going to be tweeting about it a lot in the next week or two weeks or so. And it's really, really useful. Everyone can pick up and use this thing that we built. And I'm so excited. Thank you for letting me talk about that.

That's awesome. So that's @whatlydude on Twitter. And, and also, big thanks to Digitas as well for freeing you up to make sure you're ready for this today as well. Big thanks to them.

Okay, don't stop him now. He's having such a good time. He's having a ball. Don't stop him now. If you want to have a good time, just give him a call. It's Matt with the latest tests and updates from social media companies in quick hits.

This can't keep happening. If this carries on, where does this end, Martin? Where do you get to? It's ridiculous. Anyway, moving on. It never ends. Let's rattle through these things then for you. 117 new emojis coming later this year. More gender inclusive options are gonna be there as well. I haven't got the dates in front of me for when these will hit, but they are coming. So if you like emojis, they're on their way, new ones. Snapchat launched Bitmoji TV, and that is something that I have no clue about because I don't actually use any of it at all, but it will be something that a lot of other people are interested in. And I think that they're gonna start using it to put it in curated content and featuring part of different kind of cartoon strips and kind of video content. So for those of you into all that, that is now available, coming soon to some people. Facebook's also got new moderation tools for gamers. So this is kind of some of the features we've seen previously for moderating live streams and kind of controlling what's going on in them and giving more, more to the gamers with live streams they're putting out there to sort of prevent some of the issues that they've seen. So if you're into gaming and live streaming, Facebook's got new moderation tools for you. Instagram's got emoji reactions for direct messages. So we've seen these in many places. There's not great innovation here, but Instagram has got a test going on to test them direct messages. So if you've got it, take some screenshots. I don't think I've seen many of them yet. Uh, Twitter conversation threads. Those who've been on this little T app, as it was named in the first episode of this, this, uh, beta, public beta app for Twitter, uh, you would've seen there's a lot of tests going on for conversation view. Well, iOS has now got this in the main app for everybody to enjoy. If, if you like it, that is a threaded view of the conversation and more. Uh, you'll start seeing that pop up on iOS. And Jane Wong has spotted about Facebook is testing a different default for the like button. So at the moment when you're sort of reading you see a post in your newsfeed and you can see the like, the thumbs up. She's seen some examples or found examples of them trying out different defaults so that love is there or some of the other options you can have when you're choosing to kind of react to a post. So be interesting to see if that's something that they're also experimenting with widely. Facebook's also launched a new online community hub for groups. So those of you who are managing and moderating a group, a bit like the Social Media Geek Out group, then there is a resource now which has got videos, it's got kind of frequently asked questions, It's got kind of case studies of people with groups. It's got all sorts of links and everything you need. So we'll put the link to that into the notes for this podcast and you'll be able to go and have a look for the new groups hub for Facebook. TikTok is also testing a new design. Profile design looks very similar to Instagram, is the comment that most people are making. They're moving around where you see the total followers and then some of the bio information to look a little bit like something we've seen before. Not sure how many people got that. I have not got that myself. Byte has hit 1 million downloads. They've had another good week. We had spoke about Byte last week and it seems that they've started with mixed blessings by the sounds of it. They've had issues with spam and other content issues, but they have kind of sped up and been, I think they were the number one app in the US at one point for the last week for what they're doing. And Instagram has also suddenly rolled out the ability to reply to stories with GIFs, which I kind of thought you should be able to do already anyway. But this is something that they've now formally made available. So when you're replying to a, someone else's story rather than just kind of the emojis that you can slap against as a reaction. You can now start typing a term and it'll allow you to search for a GIF and reply with a GIF. And then finally today, I've— someone pointed out that Twitter has multiple account login switching feature on desktop. Something you can do within, certainly within the iOS app, and I'm sure with the other apps as well. But now on desktop, if you have multiple accounts, social media manager, and you wanna log between the two, except to make sure you're not kind of posting the wrong thing on the wrong account, then you should be able to do that now on desktop. It's available certainly to me. Through Chrome browser. There we go. There we go.

And that's it for today. Now, as Matt mentioned earlier, next week we will be joined by Ed Couchman, who heads up Snap's UK operation. So any questions you have about Snapchat or indeed the future of cameras, he's your guy.

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And I'm @MattNavarra on Twitter. So don't forget to tell everyone about the podcast. Join the Facebook group. It's amazing. There's still Thousands of people join the group. It's incredible. It's great. So social media geek out on Facebook. Find us, join us, and there'll be more of this ridiculous kind of geek chatter there. So I think that's about it from us.

See you soon. Goodbye, geeks.